March 01, 2011

Make your own bread

Real bread & ordinary bread (background)

Tired of the ordinary bread found in the boulangeries ? Tired of the overpriced, two-day-old, rancid-looking organic bread found in the organic food shops ? Vote with you feet and do it yourself ! If you can't shun yet as easily
the boring conventional wines by setting up your miniature winery in your kitchen, bread making is a lot easier. I've been keeping thinking about it since I saw inadvertedly Pierre Overnoy busy preparing his own bread in his kitchen last autumn. Making your bread is akin to making your own wine, which I may venture into one day although it'll require me more energy and more time, but the result comes faster with the bread, and whatever our skilfulness in the process, we can consume the thing without to throw it away, which I'm not sure would be the case with our first wine...To achieve this first try, I walked into an organic food shop in Paris to buy the flour and the leaven. I'm not particularly fan of these shops, at least in France, the service is often anemic there, and as said above, the bread and the vegetables often seem to have largely overpassed their freshness limit without it bothering the managers, plus the customers seem to be all part of a crowd of dull bobos obsessed with their own little health, not really funny people you feel close to. And I don't mention the wine, they may be all organic certified and certainly fit in the carefully-set rules of these shops but I'm not sure I'd find gems there and the vinification is probably as conventional as in the grocery next door (OK, I'll try a couple of them to be sure) ... To finetune the picture, being careful about costs like many people in France, I've always the vague feeling to be ripped off in these places in the name of organic sanctity.

The dough during the early stage

I began making my own bread long time ago, with a machine, thanks to the ready-to-use flours that appeared at the German discounter Aldi, first in Germany (where I used to stock up my flour) and later in Aldi/France. I always loved German breads, Germany has in my opinion a more elaborate tradition in breads in spite of the widespread opinion which puts the French first. Go to an "ordinary" Bäckerei in Germany and compare the bread range with what you find in an "ordinary" French boulangerie, they're way ahead in that field, no question. You get a large choice of whole-wheat breads from the traditionnal black bread to the lighter ones. Plus, over there in Germany, even the hard-discounters like Aldi and Lidl sell fresh whole-wheat bread in their shops, and that, at incredible prices. Last year I crossed the Rhine to Germany from Strasbourg and tried a big loaf of maybe 750 grams that cost only 1 € at a Lidl store, I was amazed, it was fresh bread that you'd wrap yourself in paper and the taste was really good. Plus, it remained very pleasant to eat over the next couple of days. Plus, they had a very nice 50-cl Hefe Weiss Bier at 0,25 € apiece, made under the Reinheitsgebot law (in high-pressure plastic bottles but that was not a problem)... There is no such service in the French discounters, even at the French Lidl or Aldi stores. For reasons that may have to do with the enormous tax pressure on businesses (to contribute for the obese public sector) or with a lagging commercial efficiency, we pay higher prices in France for many things, including for bread.

Ready to cook

Whatever, I longed for quality and affordability, not necessarily for organic bread, and I guess that all these delicious German bread must have different non-natural components. But as I decided that I wanted to make my own bread, it had to be as natural as possible, so I bought organic flour, grinded with an Astrié mill so that the qualities of the flour are preserved. I also bought powered leaven (organic too). The one-kilogram pack of flour cost a bit less than 2 € and 85 grams of levain bio de blé cost 1,75 € if I remember. You need 42gr of leaven per kilo and I decided to make a 500gr bread for convenience. It's now my third bread, this time I bought a non-Astrié organic flour, "type 110" from La Vie Claire, an organic chain.Making bread is quite simple : you mix your 500 grams of flour with two spoons of salt, the leaven and 300 cl of tepid water, and you just mix the whole with your bare hands, kneading the bread ball until it doesn't stick to your skin. This is a healthy return to the origins (like washing your own clothes by hand, which I consider a very healthy ceremony too) and it takes only 5 minutes. After that, you just leave the bread rest half an hour in a warm room with a napkin on it. Then you knead it again a few minutes, then leave it rest and take some volume for 90 minutes in a warm place or room. Then put it to bake in the oven for maybe 35 minutes at 200 °C.

In the oven

The first bread was not salted enough and it was too compact, the second was still compact but I had adjusted the salt (2 coffee spoons instead of one) and now I'm working on the compactness issue, there must be ways to get more air in the bread, probably through more kneading in the first stages. I'll do that quietly without making it a life-or-death matter. I'm probably going to have to be more serious in my tries if I want to get a nice soft breat like the one of Pierre Overnoy or Cory Cartwright who kindly left a comment on my Overnoy post. I read again his natural-bread page and I understand that I've still a long way to go, I need to do the preaparation work more assiduously (look at the first picture, I want my bread to be like his !).

I made it myself !

The point of this short story is that it's really easy to make your own bread with healthy materials, you don't need to awake at 4am and you won't spend a fortune. And you can finetune your art in many different directions, from the manual processes of the first stages to the flour type, the leaven form, the baking and cooking temperature and duration, there's a magic combination that will make your final recipe the one you'll sting to. But even within your final tune, you'll have magic conditions and inspirations that will now and then make your bread even better. Makes me think to a piece of music by Frank Zappa named Shut up 'n play yer guitar, he registered three takes of this piece, and the last one, that he named return of the son of shut up 'n play yer guitar is definitely the most magic of all. If you have the opportunity to liten to them, you will understand what I mean. This goes for bread making and probably for winemaking, and makes me even more humble in front of talented winemakers.

P.S. : I forgot to say that I make sure to use pure water, not the Paris tap water which is laced with chlorine, which may harm the leaven life. For my last bread, in Paris, I didn't have any bottled water except a bottle of fizzy Vichy Saint Yorre (my favorite), and I had to shake a glass with my hand on it (like we do to take the CO2 out of a wine) to get rid of the bubbles....

Comments

Great post. I recently started making all my own bread too, since it's really simple, cost-effective, and cuts out all those preservatives and dough conditioners and rat turds, etc. I've been using a no-knead recipe that calls for long fermentation times -- mix the dough and let it sit for six hours or so, then bake covered at 450F (about 230C) for 30 minutes, and uncovered for another 15 or so. The longer and at higher temperature the yeast ferments, the less dense the final loaf; I too had a really dense bread the first time, because it was fermenting in a really cold spot. I think the yeast likes it around 70F (21C) -- room temperature.

Your bread looks very good.
I am still a beginner but I like making a small baguette style bread with hot peppers inside.
Some of the best bread I buy comes from a few local Italian bakeries we have nearby.

Hi, my first post here. I love your site, and can see we are very much in tune regarding which wines we like! Regarding bread, I have baked my own bread for a number of years now, and have come to certain conclusions. I cannot change the water that are running in the pipes, and using expensive salt doesn't change the taste for me. Using oil or egg, even sugar, for me reduces the longevity and "freshness" of the bread. If using oil, the bread needs to be eaten that very day. You are then left with 2 ingredients, flour and yeast/leaven. I am fortunate enough not to be bothered by any intolerance or allergies towards wheat or gluten, an I prefer my bread white (leaving out danish ryebread, which can be fantastic - conflict of interest: I am Danish). I am also fortunate enough to know a dealer of italian produce, from which I buy 25kg bags of good quality typo O or OO flour. The grind, as you mention is important, and the time from mill to bread is important. A high level of gluten will give a more chewy texture, and will allow the air to be captured better. The Yeast is also important, many strains exist, but few are readably available for purchase. You can however grow your own yeast starting a leaven by mixing fresh organic rye-flour and water, and leaving this for several days - whatever is flowing through the air will start to grow in this! Slightly easier is just bying fresh yeast from the store. I tend to use little yeast, and let the dough rise for much longer than you mention in your article. I think it is better to asses the progress of your dough by the amount it has risen, rather than the time it has been resting. If left to rise in a colder place, the process will take longer, but ultimately produce more interesting flavours, and leave time for the gluten-net to develope more proberly. a good 1-2 days of resting produces really nice bread! And if you take away a lump of the dough and leave it in the fridge in a covered container, you have a base for your next bread - just give it some water and flour once in a while, to keep it alive (salt kills yeast, so minimise this in the "mother")
Hope this is helpfull to those wishing to start their own bread-making. Also, I have recently started using live beer-brewing yeast for bread-making - really interesting stuff! Does anyone have experience with this?

Thanks to everyone for the comments, it helps me go ahead because I tend to be lazy and I must improver my work here ! I definitely understand that more resting hours will yield more aerated bread and more pleasure. I'll go that way...